Landowner Faces Leftist in Guatemalan Election

[Judi Lynn]

Landowner Faces Leftist in Guatemalan Election
Fri December 26, 2003 03:49 PM ET

(Page 1 of 2)
By Frank Jack Daniel
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala's presidential runoff vote on Sunday pits a conservative businessman against a self-proclaimed champion of the poor, with the winner certain to face calls to put a former dictator on trial for human rights atrocities.

Polls show Oscar Berger, a former Guatemala City mayor and landowner linked to the traditional farming and banking elite, leading in voter preferences over Alvaro Colom, a center-left career politician and textile factory owner.

Both hope to pick up the votes that went to former dictator Efrain Rios Montt in November's first-round presidential vote, which ended the retired general's bid to return to power through the ballot box.

Rios Montt, 77, blamed for civil war atrocities during his brutal 1982-1983 rule, came in third in the first round and failed to reach the runoff despite backing by the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG, widely seen as corrupt.

This is Guatemala's second presidential election since 1996 peace accords ended a 36-year civil war that killed 200,000 people, most of them Maya Indians living in abject poverty.

Survivors and rights group blame Rios Montt for massacres in hundreds of Indian villages as part of a "scorched earth" counterinsurgency campaign at the height of the war.
(snip/...)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4047667

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(snip) "Twenty years ago General Ríos Montt ran a military regime that killed thousands of people," says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. "Today he should be on trial, not running for president."

Ríos Montt, who now serves as president of the Guatemalan National Congress, has run for president three other times. In 1974, the general narrowly won the presidential vote, but his election was never recognized. He tried again twice in the 1990s, but both times was prohibited by a provision of the Guatemalan constitutional banning people who had participated in military coups from becoming president.

In March 1982, Ríos Montt seized power in a bloody coup d'etat that was quietly backed by the CIA and the Reagan White House. He and his fellow generals, Maldonando Schadd and Luis Gordillo, deposed Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia and set up a military tribunal with Montt at its head. The junta immediately suspended the constitution, set up secret tribunals and began a brutal crackdown on political dissidents that featured kidnapping, torture, and extra-judicial assassinations.

The generals also unleashed a scorched earth attack on the nation's Mayan population that, according to a UN commission, resulted in the annihilation of at nearly 600 villages. Within 18 months, more than 19,000 people had perished at the hands of Ríos Montt 's death squads. The killings continued even after Ríos Montt was eased from office in 1983. By 1990, more than 200,000 people had died in Guatemalan's bloody civil war, with more than 90 percent of the dead killed by government forces. Of those, more than 83 percent were indigenous Mayans. (snip/...)

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07162003.html

[mbperrin]

1. What!? The factory is not sitting on land?

Geez, wish they'd let me write headlines:
"Rich property owners meet in election"

What else is new?

[schultzee]

2. The rightest in Guatamala are Fascists Corporatists who exploit

and terrorize the peasants. The leftist would probably be fairer to all the people.

[tkmorris]

3. Such is true everywhere.........

Not just in Guatemala unfortunately.